Jackie Morris has written or illustrated more than 70 books, including the beloved children’s classics Tell Me a Dragon and East of the Sun, West of the Moon, and a volume of modern folklore for readers of all ages, Wild Folk, co-created with Tamsin Abbott. She introduced and illustrated Barbara Newhall Follett’s gem of wild literature, The House Without Windows. Morris is the award-winning co-creator (with Robert Macfarlane) of The Lost Words and The Lost Spells, which have captured the hearts of hundreds of thousands of readers of all ages. In 2018, she won the Kate Greenaway Medal and the British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year for The Lost Words.
Her artwork is held by public art collections in the U.K. and U.S. and has been published in the New Statesman, Independent, and Guardian among other venues. Morris tours and performs with the Spell Songs ensemble around the U.K. and is a Fellow of Herefordshire Art College.
From the creators of the internationally bestselling, award-winning, multi-adapted phenomenon The Lost Words: a dazzling celebration of birdlife, re-imagining the classic field guide for a new generation of nature lovers
A great thinning of the skies is underway. Around 50% of bird species are in decline worldwide. Our dawns and springs are quieter each year than the last. It does not have to be this way—but we will not save what we do not love.
The Book of Birds is a compendium of 49 bird species, from Avocet to Yellowhammer, all of which are declining or endangered. Inspired by the classic bird-books with which the authors grew up, this is a field guide with a difference. It asks not “What is that bird?”, but “Who is that bird?” It shows its readers how to identify birds, but also how to identify with them.
With lyrical precision and playfulness, Robert Macfarlane evokes each bird’s habits and habitats—their patterns of flight and of song, how they nest and hunt, the threats which shadow them, and how their wild lives intersect with ours. And on every page we encounter Jackie Morris’s exhilarating artwork, painted in watercolour and gold, animated by an extraordinary attention to detail and presence. Set among this dazzling flock of species are seven sections celebrating the “Seven Wonders” that together make up the everyday miracle of “Bird”: Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight and Migration.
Seven years in the making, The Book of Birds is a love letter to the splendours and mysteries of birdlife, and a clarion call to halt the loss of birds from land, sea and sky. From Dipper to Dunnock and Kestrel to Kingfisher, from mountain to ocean and city to river, Morris and Macfarlane conjure the unique spirit and lifeway of each species. This is a book to be treasured by bird-lovers of all ages, and a future classic work of reference.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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